Serial & Warranty Tracking on Tyres and Batteries
The one place serial tracking pays for itself immediately. A customer returns a battery, you read the serial, and you know when it was sold, who supplied it and whether the claim is live — which turns a twenty-minute argument into a ten-second lookup.
Warranty in the Kenyan parts trade is mostly settled by argument. A customer brings back a battery insisting it is four months old, the counter man believes it is closer to eleven, neither has a document, and the outcome depends on who is more persistent and whether the customer is worth keeping. Both parties usually leave slightly unhappy, and the dealer absorbs claims they did not owe while occasionally refusing ones they did.
Serial tracking ends that, and it is the rare capability that pays back in the first month rather than the first year.
What a serial record carries
Per individual unit
Field What it settles
The serial number itself Which physical unit this is
The purchase order it arrived on Which shipment, and therefore which cost
The supplier Who you claim against when a batch fails
Received date How long it sat on your shelf before selling
Warranty expiry Whether the claim in front of you is live
Warehouse and location Where it is, if it has not sold
Status and last movement Whether it is available, sold, or somewhere else
Trace events Everything that happened to it, in order
The supplier link is the one dealers undervalue. A single failing unit is a warranty conversation with a customer; six failing units from the same purchase order is a claim against your supplier — and you cannot make that claim without being able to show that all six came from one shipment.
What it is worth, in money
A dealer selling 60 batteries a month
The third line is the one worth pausing on. Dealers absorb batch failures because they cannot prove a batch — and a supplier will replace six units from one shipment when shown the evidence, and will not on the strength of a recollection. That claim is usually worth more than the customer-side leakage.
Which categories to serialise, and where to stop
Serialise here, not there
Batteries
High value, dated warranty, frequently claimed, and the category where arguments are routine. If you serialise one thing, this.
Tyres
DOT code, individually identifiable, high value, and claims turn on manufacture date as much as sale date.
Alternators, starters, compressors
High value, often reconditioned, and warranty terms vary by supplier. Also where exchange and core returns matter.
ECUs and electronics
Expensive, non-returnable once fitted, and the category where proving what you supplied protects you.
Filters, belts, pads
Batch tracking is enough. Serialising these produces a discipline nobody keeps and a data-entry burden at the counter.
Clips, bolts, bulbs
Absolutely not. The first person asked to serialise a bolt stops serialising anything.
The failure mode of serial tracking is over-scoping. A store that serialises four categories keeps it up for years; a store that tries to serialise everything abandons it inside a month and then trusts none of the data, including the four categories that were working.
Making it stick at the counter
Five practical rules
- Capture the serial at receipt, not at sale. At receipt you have a box, a purchase order and time. At sale you have a customer waiting and a mechanic on the phone, and the serial will be skipped.
- Scan, do not type. Battery and tyre codes are long and mistyped constantly, and a mistyped serial is worse than none — it looks like evidence and matches nothing.
- Record the warranty expiry from the supplier's terms, not from the sale date. Some warranties run from manufacture, some from your purchase, some from the customer's sale. Get it right per supplier once, then apply it.
- Write the serial on the customer's receipt. This is the step that does most of the work socially — a customer with the serial on their receipt makes an accurate claim, and a customer without one makes an optimistic one.
- Check the supplier link monthly. Two failures from one purchase order is a pattern; four is a claim. Nobody notices this without looking, because the failures arrive weeks apart.
The boundaries
What AWRA OpsHub does today
- Serial-level records per unit with supplier, purchase order, received date, warranty expiry, location, status and last movement.
- Trace events per serial, so the unit's history is a list rather than a reconstruction.
- Recall tracing at batch level — every event, quantity in and out, and remaining locations for a batch.
- Batch and lot tracking with expiry alongside, plus a daily expiry scan and a 30/60/90 report with value at risk.
- FEFO allocation applied unconditionally, so the oldest expiry goes out first everywhere.
What it does not do
- No warranty claim record. There is no claim entity, no claim status and no claim register — the serial tells you whether a claim is valid, and the claim itself is handled outside.
- No warranty expiry alerting. Nothing warns you that stock on your shelf is approaching the end of a supplier warranty you would want to claim within.
- No exchange or core-return tracking for reconditioned units, which matters for alternators and starters.
- No automatic warranty period by item — the expiry is a date you record per unit rather than a rule derived from a supplier term.
- No customer-facing serial lookup. A customer cannot check their own warranty.
The missing claim record is the one to plan around: the serial answers "is this valid", and tracking the claim through to a credit from your supplier is a spreadsheet. For most dealers that is acceptable, because the hard part was always the evidence rather than the administration.
Where this connects to the rest
A serial number carries the purchase order, and the purchase order carries the landed cost — so a serialised unit is also the one place in a parts business where you can say precisely what a specific physical thing cost you, including freight and duty. That is worth knowing when a customer negotiates on a single high-value unit. Parts pricing and margins has the landed cost side.
Our take
Serialise four categories — batteries, tyres, rotating electrics, electronics — and nothing else, because over-scoping is how the discipline dies. Capture at receipt by scanning rather than typing, put the serial on the customer's receipt, and check the supplier link monthly, because the claim you make against a supplier for a bad batch is usually worth more than the claims you stop absorbing from customers. The claim register itself stays in a spreadsheet, and that is the easy half.
End the warranty argument
Serial-level records carrying supplier, purchase order, received date and warranty expiry, with a full trace per unit — so a returned battery is a ten-second lookup instead of a twenty-minute negotiation.
See plans & pricingFrequently asked questions
What does serial tracking record per unit?
The serial number, the purchase order it arrived on, the supplier, the received date, a warranty expiry, its warehouse and location, its status and last movement, and a list of trace events. The supplier and purchase-order link is the most undervalued part: one failing unit is a customer conversation, six from the same shipment is a claim against your supplier — and you cannot make that claim without proving they came from one shipment.
Which parts should be serial-tracked?
Four categories: batteries, tyres, rotating electrics such as alternators and starters, and electronics such as ECUs. Filters, belts and pads are adequately covered by batch tracking, and clips, bolts and bulbs should never be serialised. Over-scoping is how serial tracking dies — a store that tries to serialise everything abandons it within a month and then distrusts even the categories that were working.
When should the serial be captured?
At receipt, not at sale. At receipt you have a box, a purchase order and time; at sale you have a customer waiting and the serial gets skipped. Scan rather than type — battery and tyre codes are long, mistyped constantly, and a mistyped serial is worse than none because it looks like evidence and matches nothing.
Is there a warranty claim register?
No. There is no claim entity, status or register — the serial record tells you whether a claim is valid, and tracking the claim through to a supplier credit happens outside the system, usually in a spreadsheet. For most dealers that is acceptable, because the hard part was always the evidence rather than the administration.
Does anything warn us before a supplier warranty expires on stock we hold?
No. There is no warranty expiry alerting, so stock approaching the end of a supplier warranty you would want to claim within will not raise anything. Batch expiry does have a daily scan and a 30/60/90 report with value at risk, but that is shelf-life expiry rather than warranty. A monthly look at serial records for slow-moving high-value units is the substitute.
What is serial tracking worth in money?
For a dealer selling around sixty batteries a month, roughly KES 108,000–216,000 a year of claims currently honoured outside warranty, plus claims wrongly refused at the cost of a customer, plus — usually the largest of the three — batch claims never made against a supplier for want of evidence. The discipline costs about twenty seconds per unit at receipt.
